Attributes as tags in namespaces and how to guess character encoding

[Martin Olsson <mnemo@minimum.se>]

--- QUESTION 1

Can *all* attributes be equivalently represented as child tags in *all* 
XML formats? If so, why does DTD define attribute separately?
In particular, I wonder about the core XML attribute such as namespaces 
etc; are these two lines equivalent (see below)?

<myTag xsl:myPrefix="hello"></myTag>
<myTag><xsl:myPrefix>hello</xsl:myPrefix></myTag>

--- QUESTION 2

XML files can use different character encodings including UNICODE and 
normal ascii text files. An XML parser must know what encoding is used 
before it starts to process the file, loading a UNICODE file is very 
different from loading a normal text file. The parser can obviously not 
first read the encoding attribute of the XML declaration which is the 
first line of the XML file and then load the file. So is there a 
complete list of possible char encodings what is XML compatible? Should 
the XML parser use a brute force approach and try all of these?




Regards,
Martin Olsson